A solo project from D’Incise (of Geneva-based improvising duo Diatribes), ‘Sécheresse Plantée En Plein Ciel’ shares something, perhaps, of that jittery, skittering, scrabbling electronics and percussion set-up, but only as an element on the periphery of its overall musical vision. This music is more about atmosphere than moment-to-moment interaction and change, though that’s not to say it skimps on detail: however, it draws one into its flow through the repetitive quality of its 11 tracks, which are structured around beats or droning synthesizer loops. The cover art gives a good indication as to what to expect: flecks of light emerging at the edge of spreading stains of darkness on the one hand, and on the other, landscapes flooded by an orange cloud of dust that renders only the sketchiest de! tails visible – the shadows under stones, the vague outline of a spindly bush. Similarly, the music is expertly constructed out of a mix of primary elements, which continue throughout the piece, and smaller spurts, buzzes, hisses – sampled sounds that disappear almost as quickly as they emerge; unconscious thoughts, sudden traces of movement glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, ghosts stalking the corridors, disappearing round the corner. The effect can be unsettling, though it can also be playful, brooding, perhaps even melancholic. Track 8 is entitled ‘sécheresse en péripherie’ – ‘drought on the periphery’ – which nicely captures the record’s sense of dread, of a crisis about to happen, or the faintest echoes of one that has already happened, a long time ago, yet li! ngers on still, the grubby traces of the past imprinted on the mind. Stains can be scrubbed from walls, ruined buildings can be rebuilt, wounds can be stitched up– but the scars of memory are less easy to heal. And memory is an important factor here – D’Incise created these soundscapes from field recordings made in the Czech Republic and Poland a year before the album was composed in Geneva. Field recordings abstracted from their source, voices and creaks and clankings – a station announcement, the sound of moving transport, the crackle of a lighted match – negate the re-assuring equivalence of sound to something particular in the world, turn it into something that deceives, that echoes, that can’t be pinned down. Can one trust one’s sense? What is one being told through these sounds? Perhaps thi s is something to do with the very notion of recording &! ndash; a sound played back, days, weeks, months, years after the event, has lost its connection to what originally produced it, has become an empty echo in technology’s endless playback – the natural has become the synthetic, the imitation, the reflection. D’Incise writes: “this album is something like a blur travel diary second reading,” and a further layer presents itself here: while he himself may know the source of these recordings, however abstracted and musicked they have become, his listeners do not have that privilege. All they have to go on is guesswork. The result – for this listener at least – is that one cannot entirely surrender oneself to the sounds; at the edge of this ‘ambient’ music is something troubling; a promise of ‘signification’ offered by the field! recording aspect is like a carrot dangled in the air, always pulled away at the last moment. Whereas a written diary might pretend to offer up its writer’s inmost thoughts (those he cannot tell others), might provide access to the core of that person in a way that would never be possible in a social context, this audio diary refuses the narrativizing at the heart of the written diary, leaving only the vague sense impressions, the vaguest feelings. It offers nothing concrete; everything is shifting, elusive. Do the suggestions of a climax, a crisis, at the end of track six ‘reflect’ a personal dilemma, an emotional trauma, or something as innocuous as a train passing under a tunnel? To pose such questions in the first place is an error – it is to fundamentally misconstrue the processes of this ‘diary’. The danger in a project such as this would be using field recordings ! as just another element in a vague ambient wash of sound – like the ‘whale song’ or ‘rainforest tranquillity’ CDs you might find in an English garden centre. What D’Incise achieves here is something much more interesting. The field recordings are not used in the manic, collage-sampling fashion of something like C. Spencer Yeh’s ‘The Strangler’, which in fact has a stronger connection to ‘signification’ – in the manner of the fragments one catches from a radio station. Rather, they seem to have been interiorized into the very heart of the music, integrated into, and even generating, its textural and rhythmic structure: quietly clanking and clicking loops, suggestions of children’s voices, pizzicato strings, a double-bass, a twinkling ‘riff’; everyth! ing suggested, nothing revealed. (DG)

Back in Vital Weekly 686 we first lent an ear to D’Incise, a project from Geneva, Switzerland. Here he returns with an album for Gruenrekorder, and for the label, its that much needed change: to incorporate field recordings – in this case made in the Czech Republic and Poland – with music. D’Incise, it is noted before, is the man armed with a sampler. Rhythms play a role in his work, and stretched out flows of sound – ambient in other words – are also important. To this he adds his field recordings – children playing, ventilation, means of transport. He bends and pitches his material around, like before. One of the things that also stayed, a bit unfortunately, is that his pieces are throughout a bit overlong. Six, seven minutes is the rule here, and that is, I think a bit long. The music is not always that good or that varied to hold the attention for the entire length of a track. That is a pity. The music would certainly gain power if things would have been shorter and more to the point. The great potential is certainly there but too stretched out and leaps into mediocre pieces. (FdW)

D’Incise has I think played with Diatribes, the didactic improvising combo from Switzerland, but here he be with a solo effort Sécheresse Plantée en Plein Ciel (GRUENREKORDER Gr 071). This is an interesting approach to field recordings, which allows the possibility of radical cut-ups and electronic treatments, to create a disorienting sonic portrait of everyday life in the Czech Republic and Poland. The murmured banalities of humankind are given an extra thrilling and slightly dangerous edge by these digital interpolations.

Like many a Gruenrekorder release, d’incise’s Sécheresse Plantée En Plein Ciel is heavily field recordings-based, in this case recordings collected in the Czech Republic and Poland during the summer of 2007. However, to a far greater degree than the standard Gruenrekorder release (or any release for that matter), d’incise’s recording occupies a middle ground between field recordings and electronica (of the electro-acoustic kind). More precisely, rather than ornamenting electronic tracks with field recordings detail as may producers do—using them as added colour, in other words—, the Geneva, Switzerland-based producer (also a member of Audioactivity, a music-and-visual collective founded in 2000 in Geneva) manipulates the field recordings elements so that they become source material for building the rhythm and melodic structures within the electronic tracks (the slow pulse in “Omniprésence,” for instance, sounds as if it was created from a sample of keys). Adopting such a production methodology makes for arresting results, in part because it’s a strategy that’s not commonly undertaken. That it isn’t is a bit of a shame; it’s rare to hear originating natural materials used in such ‘musical‘ manner (especially ear-catching is the way micro-edits of children’s voices are used as rhythm material during “Insouciance apparente”) and Sécheresse Plantée En Plein Ciel turns out to be more engaging than the norm.

Subtle melodies, bass lines, and electronic rhythms thread themselves through dense and often slow-moving thickets of samples (city traffic, public voice announcements, trains, people, animals, industrial clatter) in a project that d’incise likens to a blurry travel diary. There’s no shortage of textural content, with clicks, static, and other noise details surfacing alongside the ‚melodic‘ material. At times, the d’incise sound strays into others‘ orbits. One could imagine “Sécheresse en périphérie” appearing on Autechre’s EP7, for example, given how similar d’incise’s beatwork and ponderous tonal weave is to tracks on that recording. If d’incise’s material is relatively distinguished for being original in approach, the release itself suffers from an all-too-common malady: excessive length. Shaving a minute or two off of some of the longer tracks (those in the seven- to eight-minute range) wouldn’t have hurt the material significantly but would have allowed the project to establish itself more succinctly.

Using recordings sourced through travels in the Czech Republic and Poland mixed with various identifiable (and not so) instrumentation d’incise has created a really quite marvellous collage of sound. His take on electronic music is one of disjointed melodies and broken ambience that allows him to hold the listener in a limbo like sense of disorientation. His field recordings are beautifully chosen and there are moments where the grimy mundaneity of contemporary life almost breaks through before it’s all is pulled back into the panoptic swirl by the quality of his music.

D’incise operates in that strange hinterland between genres. His music operates within and without referential boundaries and is all the stronger for it. He’s unafraid to flirt with melody and positively embraces rhythm but each is kept and utilised purely as tools within and extensive arsenal of methodology. This all leads towards two conclusions that can be drawn here; that this album is hard to define but easy to listen to.

Geneva-based electronic producer D’Incise (real name Laurent Peter) is a member of that city’s Audioactivity music & visual collective and has spent the last eight years assembling an impressively large back catalogue of releases for a range of netlabels including Zymogen and Antisocial. This latest release Secheresse Plantee En Plein Ciel, his fourth album in total and his first for Gruenrekorder, sees Peter crafting a ‘blurred travel diary’ drawn from field recordings made in the Czech Republic and Poland, resulting in eleven sinister and atmospheric tracks veering from musique concrete through to dark ambient. Opening track ‘Le Fleau’ aptly sets the tone here, sending digitally-processed textures rippling out over a vast backdrop of rusty metallic sounds, what sounds like squealing wires of strings and distant snatches of sampled conversations, the entire tableau carrying a distinct sense of fear thanks to the addition of eerie, minor-key drones.

‘Regarder La Croix Plutot Que La Poutre’ meanwhile ventures further towards dark, industrial-edged IDM in the vein of Detritus or Raoul Sinier, with spidery distorted breakbeats slicing their way against a wash of ominous, glittering synth strings, the distant sound of digitally-manipulated conversation creeping through as if overhead from another room, before ‘Secheresse Plantee En Plein Ciel’ sees crackling micro-dub influences coming to the surface beneath a hypnotically graceful backdrop of humming harmonic pads, distant bleeping synthetic tones and Geiger counter-esque popping digital errors. Throughout this entire album, there’s a palpable atmosphere conjured that evokes the sense of creeping unease, and while there are certainly plenty of undeniably beautiful and delicate moments along the way, the danger’s never lurking too far from the surface. An excellent and evocative album from D’Incise that will certainly please fans of industrial-tinged ambience and dark musique concrete.